A secure element is either a tamper-resistant physical component able to store data and to provide services in a secure manner or a software component emulating such a component and providing a trusted storage area and trusted services. A secure element has an operating system configured to deny access to its resources to an entity which is not entitled. In general, a secure element has a limited amount of memory, a processor with limited capabilities and is devoid of battery. For instance a UICC (Universal Integrated Circuit Card) is a secure element which embeds SIM applications for telecommunication purposes. A secure element can be installed, fixedly or not, in a terminal, like a mobile phone for example. In some cases, the terminals are constituted by machines that communicate with other machines for M2M (Machine to Machine) applications.
A secure element can be in the format of a smart card, or may be in any other format such as for example but not limited to a packaged chip as described in PCT/SE2008/050380, or any other format.
It is known to solder or weld the secure element in a host device, in order to get it dependent of this host device. This is done in M2M (Machine to Machine) applications. The same objective is reached when a chip (a secure element) containing an application is contained in the host device. The chip is for example soldered to the mother-board of the host device or machine and constitutes an embedded-secure element (eSE).
A removable secure element uniquely associated with its hosting device may also be considered as an embedded-secure element.
Applications may be downloaded and installed in a secure element. Usually, an application is linked to the operating system. For instance, the executable part of an application may call specific functions of the operating system. Due to the increasing lifetime of secure elements, the need to change the current operating system may occur after a large number of applications has been installed in the secure element. In this case, the user of the secure element may want to keep these applications even in case of replacement of the operating system by a new one. Unfortunately, the links between the applications and the replaced operating system will be lost when the replacement happens.
There is a need to maintain applications in a functional state after replacing the operating system of a secure element.